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On Wednesday, May 1, join writer Hannah Proctor in conversation with n+1 managing editor Tess Edmonson. They’ll be discussing Proctor’s new book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, out this month from Verso. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Beer and wine will be available for […]
Nine hundred, 1,000, 1,500, 1,800, 2,600, 3,500, 4,600, 5,000, 5,900, 6,500. The fatality figures, with which no one can keep up, are augmented every few hours with another twenty here and thirty there as this building or that is brought down in a cataclysmic burst of fire, smoke, and rubble. Three or four hundred people — or more — are being killed every day.
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounded by people who look and talk like me, all of us a little drunk but maintaining our nervous, manic professionalism.
Cold hard truth: you never know what the fuck someone’s gone through, and that’s why you can never take shit personal — dude actually cares, just shows it in his own way; every warrior has his strength, and when shit gets tense, find common ground.
Those of us opposed to the vision of Rufo and Walsh ought to ask why the right wing is so scared of the political power of organized teachers — scared to the point that they have organized their movement leaders into blaming teachers unions for kids coming out as trans.
In the late morning we drove to Pont du Gard, an old Roman aqueduct. The drive was an hour and a half. The riverbeds we passed on the way there were almost completely dry, and we wondered whether the water level would be high enough to swim. But I had looked up Instagram photos tagged there and saw people swimming just a few days before.
I remember learning NOBA in the eighth grade, where it was always the perfectly empty, emphatic solution for a sentence in a too-short paragraph.